Category: computer hacks

Names and labels are difficult. Take this “3D Printed” water-cooling loop by [Visual Thinker] on YouTube. It undeniably uses 3D printing — but it also uses silicone casting and laser-cut acrylic, too. All of these are essential parts, yet only 3D printing gets top billing in his thumbnail. At least the version we saw, anyway; […]
It seems like a fair assessment to state that the many ‘AI’ features that Microsoft added to Windows 11 are at least somewhat controversial. Unsurprisingly, this has led many to wonder about disabling or outright removing these features, with [zoicware]’s ‘Remove Windows AI’ project on GitHub trying to automate this process as much as reasonably […]
Back in the mid 1990s, the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system cemented the Redmond software company’s dominance over most of the desktop operating system space. Apple were still in their period in the doldrums waiting for Steve Jobs to return with his NeXT, while other would-be challengers such as IBM’s OS/2 or Commodore’s […]
Back in the innocent days of Windows 98 SE, I nearly switched to Linux on account of how satisfied I was with my Windows experience. This started with the Year of the Linux Desktop in 1999 that started with me purchasing a boxed copy of SuSE Linux and ended with me switching to Windows 2000. […]
When picking operating systems for a closer look here in the Daily Drivers series, the aim has not been to merely pick the next well-known Linux distro off the pile, but to try out the interesting, esoteric or minority OS. The need remains to use it as a daily driver though, so each one we […]
This project gives a whole new meaning to DIY PC. We don’t know how capable you were as a teenager, but could you have designed your own Ryzen-based mini PC? Whilst making repairs to laptop internals, [Dominik Baroński] was busy taking notes. Modern super-integrated laptop PCs have reached the point where all the functions of a […]
Back in 2016, we took you to a collection of slightly dilapidated prefabricated huts in the English Home Counties, and showed you a computer. The place was the National Museum of Computing, next to the famous Bletchley Park codebreaking museum, and the machine was their reconstruction of Colossus, the world’s first fully electronic digital computer. […]
Over on YouTube [Matt Brown] hacks a Chinese security camera recently banned by the US government. If you didn’t hear about this you can find out more over here: Major US online retailers remove listings for millions of prohibited Chinese electronics. After powering the camera with a power-over-Ethernet (PoE) adapter [Matt] sets about monitoring network […]
In this video our hacker [Inkbox] shows us how to create a computer game that runs directly on computer hardware, without an operating system! [Inkbox] briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it. He talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s. After Intel’s implementation of UEFI was […]
Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very quickly of we simply loaded up a succession of Linux distros, so we’ve avoided simply testing the latest Debian, or Fedora. That’s not […]